Clive Thompson
Medium
New York, NY, United States
Contact Clive
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Clive:
52 things I learned in 2022
This year I worked on fascinating projects in energy, media and health* at Magnetic, and learned many learnings. → Read More
Linux On The Laptop Works So Damn Well That It’s Boring
A few days ago I took my Macbook Pro into the shop. It needed a new battery; the current one is five years old and dies after an hour. We’ll be in touch by next Tuesday, the repair shop said. → Read More
It’s fun to write software that serves no serious purpose
Doodling, sketching, and mucking around with computers have weird and deep pleasures → Read More
When Coal First Arrived, Americans Said 'No Thanks'
Back in the 19th century, coal was the nation's newfangled fuel source—and it faced the same resistance as wind and solar today → Read More
Design lessons from guitar pedals
What we can learn from technology that’s designed to be stepped on → Read More
Drones Are Turning Into Personal Flying Machines
We were promised jetpacks that never arrived. But you know what’s finally here? Big, honking drones you can ride on. → Read More
The Invention of ‘Jaywalking’
In the 1920s, the public hated cars. So the auto industry fought back — with language.. “The Invention of ‘Jaywalking’” is published by Clive Thompson in Marker. → Read More
The power of seeing only the questions in a piece of writing
(tl;dr — if you want to try out my web tool for seeing only the questions in a piece of writing, it’s online here!) Sometimes they’re rhetorical, like the one I just asked now. They’re a literary… → Read More
I’ve Been Playing Homebrew Video Games Made By Soviet Teens In The 1980s
How Czechoslovak students smuggled dissident ideas in amongst the pixels → Read More
What the History of 'Spirit Photography' Portends for the Future of Deepfake Videos
Today’s video hoaxes can be downright ugly. But image-makers have been fooling viewers from the beginning → Read More
Gang of violent otters is attacking people in Alaska
A bunch of river otters has recently been attacking people in Anchorage, Alaska. There were three attacks in September alone, on a child, a woman, and several dogs. Apparently these attacks have been going on for a few years now, which leads authorities to suspect it's a specific gang of otters. As this post at… → Read More
Man with zero hours flying experience accidentally takes off, and barely lands
A guy bought a new plane but, as yet, had zero hours of flying experience. For some reason he was allowed to taxi his plane from one part of the airport to the other -- and while doing so, he accidentally took off. Now he had a big problem on his hand, because landing a… → Read More
A bi-directional font that can be read forwards or backwards
In 1909, Scott Perky of Niagara Falls patented a font where each letter and symbol has a vertical line of symmetry. This allows you to write a word either forwards or backwards without needing to change or reverse the characters. In his patent filing -- which is online here and is quite delightful to read… → Read More
Playing DOOM via Twitter
tweet2Doom is a bot, created by Georgi Gerganov, that lets you play DOOM by @replying commands to the account. You can chain together a bunch of commands, and the bot will execute them and reply with a little clip from the game showing what you did and what happened inside the game. To keep playing,… → Read More
Flingbot, a robot that hurls paint at canvases
Jay of JBV Creative is an engineer and artist who specializes in 3D printing to make gorgeous automata — you can see some of his models, like a handcranked marble coaster or flapping crane, a… → Read More
The math behind the card game "Spot It"
“Spot It” is an incredibly fun card game where you try to match objects printed on round cards — and the twist is that there’s aways one, but only one, matching object on ea… → Read More
Draw a picture and this AI matches it to a movie image
Hugging Face, a company that makes AI language-and-image-processing tools, just released this little web toy “Draw To Search”. You draw something and it attempts to recognize what you&#… → Read More
Survey finds 22% of scientists who do media interviews about COVID get violent threats
Nature surveyed 300 scientists who've done media interviews about COVID. The results had some surprisingly positive notes -- 85% said "their experiences of engaging with the media were always or mostly positive, even if they were harassed afterwards". But as you might expect, a significant chunk described some ghastly abuse. Fully 15% got death threats,… → Read More
Spooky photos of ice castles
Frankie Carino is a photographer and sculptor who lately has been focusing on ice castles -- i.e. human-created buildings made of ice. He's taken some gorgeous and eerie photos of them; in his lens, the ice has an unsettlingly organic quality and transmits light on a diffuse and crepuscular register. I'm super into them --… → Read More
Scientists create plants that store light and radiate it back out
A team at MIT has developed a technique for getting plants to behave like glow-in-the-dark toys—they can absorb light, store it, and then radiate it back out. This team has been working on glowing plants for a while now; in 2019 they debuted plants that were treated with an enzyme based on the same chemical… → Read More